Issue 5 - Lucy Pullen

Quick Overview

+ Canadian white ash with 6 quadrilateral sides+ Original poster by the artist+ Released fall 2008

Lucy Pullen’s issue was a mathematically bisected piece of Canadian white ash with the words ”Event Being” drilled in at two angles. It is accompanied by a small poster of her original design.

The angles were worked out by a friend of Lucy’s (Justin) who is an astro-particle physicist. All of the objects are complementary to one another, so if you find someone else who has this issue, you can place the issues side by side and they will nest together. If you find several people who have this issue and you all get together and piece them side by side by side by side, they will make one giant piece of mathematically dissected wood.

One of our favorite things about this issue is something that Lucy said early on about it. It had to do with the sound it makes when you turn it over in your hands and let you fingers slide along its faces. She called it ”the sound of the moon”.

There were many who were involved in getting this project just right: Val Kasvin over at Sputnik Models, who figured out a way to drill the text just exactly so; Julian at Arrow Paper, where the issue box was created; and Brett and Scott at MacFadden and Thorpe who helped create and lay out the poster. The issue was milled at Westwind Hardwood in Sidney British Columbia. Special knives were made there in order to plane four faces at the same time. Travis Hebert, who is finishing up with wood-working to begin airplane engineering school, milled, cut, sanded, and oiled every object for us. He was assisted by Lucy and Michael Drebert. Jan Nelson sourced the wood, recommended Projektol for the finish and brought cookies everyday.

Lucy Pullen studied painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, graduating in 1994. Then she turned to sculpture. Her work has a playfulness and directness that opens it up to any viewer. It can be critically linked to conceptualism, and to a NSCAD trend to use unusual materials to make metaphysical points, but it is not necessary to know a secret art language to understand or enjoy it.1 Her work is marked by conceptual ambition, technical daring, and antic humor.2 Pullen intentionally shifts her work between the everyday and the esoteric as she pursues projects that give structure to the essential uncertainty and randomness of the universe.3 Pullen's work is built on paradox.4 While her work varies dramatically in its’ final form, an analytical orientation can be isolated as a unifying thread throughout her recent work.5 Product and invention never seem to be the point. Discovery, arising from the process of creation and destruction, does.6 Preoccupied with changing the points of reference that box art in as art, she calls attention to the artistic potential within everyday experience. Pullen is the anti-thesis of the cynical, know-it-all artist.7